Gonzales
Posted: Tuesday, June 12, 2007 9:21 AM by Domenico Montanaro
Filed Under:
Congress, Democrats, Republicans
NBC’s Ken Strickland reports that the no-confidence vote on Alberto Gonzales failed, 53-38. Sixty votes were needed for the motion to proceed. Senator Stevens (R) voted present. The following seven Republicans voted with ALL Democrats in the symbolic no-confidence vote: Collins, Coleman, Smith, Specter, Hagel, Snowe, and Sununu. (Collins, Coleman, Smith, Hagel, and Sununu are all up Senate re-election in 2008.) Lieberman voted against the resolution with most of the Republicans.
Presidential candidates Biden, Brownback, Dodd, McCain, and Obama didn’t vote on the measure. The AP has the full roll call vote.
The New York Times: “Republicans who rejected the proposal offered little defense of Mr. Gonzales, but criticized the resolution as a politically motivated stunt and a waste of the Senate’s time. ‘If I were president, I would have asked Alberto Gonzales to resign as attorney general,’ George V. Voinovich, Republican of Ohio, said in a statement. But he said, ‘Today’s vote does nothing to rectify the current problem or ensure it doesn’t happen again.’”
The New York Daily News adds, however: “[I]t still forced Republicans into the uncomfortable role of challenging a statement most agreed with: that Gonzales is not competent to be the nation's top lawman.”
As for the future of the Gonzales probe, the Los Angeles Times notes: "Democrats vowed to continue their investigation into whether Gonzales, in tandem with the White House, had politicized hiring decisions and various investigations at the Justice Department in ways that would boost Republicans. There were signs that Democrats were on the verge of taking that investigation to a new level, possibly by issuing subpoenas to the White House for documents and testimony of such figures as political operative Karl Rove."
Still, it does appear that congressional Democrats are running out of ways to bring up the Gonzales situation in a public way, making it appear that the attorney general may have weathered this storm -- for now, unless something else comes out. Then again, Gonzales has already survived longer than many in this town expected.
But Gonzales and his Justice Department suffered this defeat yesterday. “The federal appeals court in Richmond, Va., ruled yesterday that the president may not declare civilians in this country to be ‘enemy combatants’ and have the military hold them indefinitely. The ruling was a stinging rejection of one of the Bush administration’s central assertions about the scope of executive authority to combat terrorism.”
